In many environments, any delay or latency that results from the generation and transmission of digital audio data for presentation or playback to a listener is not problematic. For example, when an audio Compact Disc (CD) is played, several hundreds of milliseconds may elapse during the time period that the digital audio data is read from the CD, a corresponding analog signal is derived from the digital data and subsequently amplified, and acoustic sound waves are generated from the amplified audio signal. However, such a delay is generally not detectable by the listener, as the listener has no reference point in time with which to detect that delay.
In other examples, such as when audio is presented in conjunction with corresponding video, as is typical with television and Digital Video Disc (DVD) presentations, latency is more of a concern, as synchronization of the audio with its corresponding video is necessary for a viewer to properly experience the resulting audio/video presentation. In that case, the digital audio and video data generally are received by a single device, such as a television, set-top box, DVD player, and the like. Further, the video and audio data are often marked with timestamp information so that the receiving device may align the video and audio data appropriately prior to forwarding the data to an output device, such as a television, for presentation to the user. Thus, any potential relative delay in the audio or video data of an audio/video presentation is adjusted and eliminated.
However, in some environments, such an adjustment may prove to be more difficult. For example, audio associated with an audio/video presentation that is being provided by a television or similar video presentation device may be retransmitted to one or more remote audio-receiving devices to provide the audio more directly to one or more listeners. Such retransmission is likely to introduce an additional latency into the audio signal by the time the audio reaches the listeners, thus likely causing the resulting sound waves to lag the video portion of the presentation as experienced by the user by an unsatisfactory amount.